


Interdimensional Laundry

by Breanna_B



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Domestic, Non-Linear Narrative, who does the laundry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-07-05
Packaged: 2020-03-26 11:44:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19005118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Breanna_B/pseuds/Breanna_B
Summary: The TARDIS seems to have an inexhaustable supply of outfits for the companions to wear when they find themselves on different planets or in different times, but what happens to the laundry? Each Doctor has their own personality, so I guess each of them would have their own way of getting the day-to-day domestic chores done.





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> When we were watching the latest season, the first with Doctor Thirteen, she felt a lot closer to her companions in some ways than previous Doctors had been. I also felt that she would act just the same with the TARDIS as she does with her human companions - and in some ways the TARDIS is as much as companion as the ones with arms and legs, and voices, and just as prone to getting into trouble and saving them all (when the writers remember). I had this vision of Thirteen alone in the TARDIS, but talking to it as she was doing the laundry, chatting away just as though it was a human.  
> So then I thought - how would all the other Doctors solve the problem of the laundry? and this fic was born.  
> There is likely to be one chapter per Doctor, but as I haven't met all the Doctors yet that might change. Chapter title is the number of the Doctor, and to confuse matters the first one is one:

Susan wasn't a fan of early 21st century earth. Yes, they'd got rid of the smog and the global temperatures hadn't risen too high yet, and the people were nice enough. She liked their level of technology too – enough to make life easier but not too much that one was insulated from reality.  
The problem came about after they'd been there a little over a month. In between adventures in the TARDIS, Susan had settled in nicely at the local school.  
That, she decided, had been the problem.  
She had settled, and let slip too much about her unusual lifestyle.  
Not the alien encounters, adventures and time travel (she hadn't told anyone about that). Social services had been called when her form tutor had found out that Susan spent most evenings tidying up after her grandfather and cooking his meals, before getting on with her homework. Of course Susan couldn't say that her homework took only a fraction of the time it took her peers, and if she was lucky they would take a trip to see some historical sights in real time – far more interesting than just reading about them in a book.  
Anyway, a very kind sounding lady wanted to visit them at home, to 'assess' if she qualified as a young carer.  
She supposed that having an understanding teacher and a weeks holiday in Clapton might very well be desirable for an ordinary teenager stuck at home looking after an ageing grandparent, but it hardly applied to them.  
The Doctor couldn't quite understand how having a dutiful granddaughter was an anomaly, blamed the rise of the internet and the invention of the portable phone, and promptly parked the TARDIS in the 1960s where a police call box stood out a lot less.  
She quite liked the 60s. The music was better.  
Also, no-one paid much attention to a granddaughter who had to be home in time to cook dinner.  
For the laundry though, she always got grandfather to drop her off in 1970s Las Vegas. There was a busy laundromat that seemed to be used by the whole town and his brother, and no-one blinked an eye at the eclectic selection of clothes she put through the machines.  
The Doctor asked her once why she wanted to use this particular shop. Susan told him she was friends with Jolene who ran the place, and it was nice to catch up with her every now and again.  
Which was true.  
What she didn't mention was that the quarters changed hands so quickly in this town that no-one noticed if the 1920s coin was freshly minted, or even if the coins they were feeding into the slot machines hadn't officially been made yet.


	2. Ten

Saying goodbye was always hard. Some goodbyes were better than others, when people chose to go, like baby birds with new wings – on to better things.  
And some goodbyes were hearts-wrenchingly hard.  
The hardest part wasn't taking her memories from her. It wasn't even when she barely even ackowledged his presence, though that was enough to shatter even the crystaline heart of the Oracle at Kynos.  
He stood outside the door to the TARDIS, as if the passing of time would make his task easier.  
This, he thought to himself, is the most difficult thing I've ever done. Forget Cybermen and Daleks, forget finding a way out from iminent death with only a sonic screwdriver, my friends and my wits. This is too difficult, too painful to bear contemplating. But it needs to be done.   
He glanced back at the house where Donna's mum and grandad were arguing. He could see them through the front room window. She was all arms-flailing, pain and confusion lending manic energy to her movements. He was calm sorrow, talking to her, trying to engage her brain.  
He could see Donna in both of them.

His task didn't take long in the end. That no-nonsense girl who wouldn't take flak from anyone, and certainly didn't like being told what she could and couldn't do, thank you very much, had made her own rules for her stay in the TARDIS, and stuck by them. She had chosen a modest room, not too far in, and although she had brought bags and boxes and suitcases of belongings with her, it was all here. She had kept it all in her room, as though she were afraid of outstaying her welcome, afraid to make herself at home in the rest of the TARDIS, afraid of treading on someone else's toes.  
Now he needed to return it all home with her. The human brain is a fickle thing, and although he'd removed the memories of himself and all they had done together, too much digging and something might turn up. She musn't think too hard about the past few months, mustn't wonder where her favourite jacket went.  
He had learnt so much in the short time he had travelled with her, she had reached into his soul and shown him compassion and empathy and love, sometimes hers, sometimes his. She had shown him that you can feel these emotions and still be strong. But even until near the very end she still saw herself as a nobody. Just a temp from Chiswick.

He'd shown her around when she came to stay, with her bags and boxes and suitcases. A tour of the cloister, the library, the swimming pool. Her eyes had lit up when they reached the wardrobe room, and she walked past the racks of clothing, trailing fingers across coats and jackets and dresses and togas. Stroking silks with the back of her hands, snuggling into furs, marvelling at the irredescent fabrics from a different time and place.  
“Try it on,” he'd said, as she kept being drawn back to a shawl from the chiming forest of glass.  
“Oh, no, I couldn't. I'm alright.”  
“Go on. They're all there to be worn.”  
“No, its ok. I don't need to. . . Now that, that's what I call a washing machine.” She abandoned the clothing, potential outfits hanging on their racks, and headed towards the machinery in the centre of the room. “It is a washing machine, isn't it? Not some . . . alien clothes making gizmo. I mean, it looks like a washing machine, it has the door on the front and everything, but its huge. You could do the whole football team's kits in that, and have space left over for the away team.”  
Typical Donna, a sudden attack of insecurity covered up with verbal diarrhea.   
“Now, that is not a washing machine," He butted in to the miniscule gap she left while taking a breath. "I mean, its not just a washing machine, its an all-in-one laundry system. It even dries, irons and folds your clothes, all in the time it takes to watch a movie.”  
He could see the questions lining up in her head, could almost hear her asking how a machine could iron clothes, even those fiddly little bits, and what about pleats?  
“What sort of movie?” Was the question that eventually came out. “I mean, yeah, most films are like, an hour and a half long, but I went to the cinema once with this guy, Seamus, who I met at the office before the office before last that I temped for, and that film was, like, sooo long, they put in an intermission, like they did when everything was in black and white.”  
“Yeah, and I saw this film on Dreag, well, I say a film, it was an 'educational dramatic presentation' (with air quotes) beamed straight to your optic nerve and that took two and a half days. But then again, there was that one in the 48th century where they were trying out new technology which inserted the film directly into your brain. It only took 2 seconds, which I think is the shortest movie I ever saw, but I came out with two weeks of new memories that weren't mine. Turns out it'd got cross wired with one of the other test subjects and I got the equivalent of his holiday snaps, while he got the entire history of the word blue.”  
The 'in awe' expression on her face was battling with laughter that she wasn't sure was quite polite, after all, she was a guest in his home, but in the end something he'd said made her frown in thought.  
“So which is it? How long does the laundry machine take – two seconds or two and a half days?”  
“I'm not sure, actually. I just shove stuff in and come back later. Sometimes its done, but sometimes you have to go away and come back some other time. I never have worked out why.” And they strolled off, arm in arm, as he told her about all the other quirks the TARDIS was likely to inflict upon her.  
And so, Donna learnt to use the all-in-one alien laundr-o-matic, sometimes shouting at it when it seemed to be holding her clothes hostage for no reason. But she didn't wear the clothes in the wardrobe, not unless he specifically told her she could. Self-reliance is a difficult habit to break.  
And when he cleared out her room, he found all her clothes, already in the bags and boxes and suitcases, and he took them out to Wilf, who handed them to Sylvia. She took them up with a sigh, as if to say 'and why do I have to clear up after her?'  
He watched her as she took the bags, and boxes, and suitcases into the house, and didn't see Wilf watching him. Didn't see the look of empathy from the man who knew what it was like to lose someone.


	3. Three

She loved Earth, she really did, but at the moment she had no desire to go back. The thought of all the places they could visit, now that the TARDIS was back in action, places she could not even dream of. No, she didn't want to go back to Earth, not even a tiny bit.

Well, there is maybe one reason . . .

The Doctor was obviously enjoying his newly returned wings. After a few years of forced stay on his second most favourite planet in the universe (yes, only second favourite. One's homeworld, no matter how flawed, would always come first any way you should choose to rank them. Especially, no – even more so - if one were marooned away from it), he was enjoying planet hopping.

“Just giving her a run,” he would say, or: “testing the new dematerialisation circuit”, or: “Its good to open the throttle after a dormant period.”

She didn't always understand the science behind the Doctor's solutions to their adventures. She might have a quick brain, but couldn't keep up with the mental leaps he performed when she didn't have the database of knowledge he had. But even so, the science seemed sound, if a little futuristic. She hadn't believed him when he said his ship travelled in time as well. All she had been taught had totally ruled out the possibility of time travel, regardless of what level of technology a species might have.

At the moment, though, she was definitely willing herself back in time. Not that the Doctor would allow it, travelling back into her own personal time stream.

Yes, there had been disadvantages to being a young female civillian attached to UNIT. The enlisted soldiers' lack of respect was a serious difficulty to overcome. The wolf whistles and rude comments that had been aimed at her when she walked across base on her own had at least stopped once the men had been 'enlightened' about her status (a discussion she pretended not to hear despite the roars of the Brigadier's voice being audible half-way across base), but she could tell they still felt the same, they just knew better than to show it.

The strict hierarchy was also stifling. She had watched the system unfolding in front of her once, while she was being used by the Doctor to hold something steady, her gaze had drifted to the scene outside. She saw the very moment a Private had an idea, and watched as it took twenty minutes to pass up the chain of command. (Twenty minutes she spent being a human clamp stand, unnecessarily). Eventually it reached Captain Yates, who presented the original soldier to the Doctor in order to report his observation directly.

Jo lamented the waste of talent as the boy was shipped back to his original unit once his brain had been picked clean. In even that short time it was clear his intelligence rose above the level of most of the squaddies they had met so far, but in this world, everyone had their place and stuck to it.

On the other hand, the hierarchy of command was a wonderful thing – if you were at the top! The Doctor, the man to whom even the Brigadier took orders (on occasion), was given all the priviledges and hospitality due to the top brass. On those rare times there was no emergency, dinner was served at the top table, with silver cutlery, and crystal glasses, and officers in dress uniform. A bagman was assigned to them, to literally be in charge of their bags, their belongings. Dirty clothes didn't exist in this world – they were spirited away and returned clean and neatly folded.

Jo had never considered before what the soldier responsible for that had done with her 'unmentionables'. Perhaps he'd enlisted an elderly matron to take charge of Jo's things. Whatever had happened, she knew it had been a whole lot easier than what she had to do about it now.

_How can I phrase it to him_ , she thought, _that I could do with a clean bra?_


End file.
